“There’s gonna be just one shot, if there’s any shooting, and I want to hear it,” the gun-toting woman says. “Tell the kids to shut up.”

The teacher taps her desk with a ruler, and the kindergartners stop chanting; only Tommy mumbles, “It’s a miracle,” before he can stop. “I think we should sing it, like a song,” the teacher tells the kids. “Like this,” she says, before she starts singing. It is Clara Swift’s scene; they still show the film clip.

We know from the astonished faces of the kindergartners that the kids have never heard their teacher sing before. In the audience, we aren’t expecting Clara Swift to sing beautifully; every time I see and hear this scene, the purity of her voice is a shock.

“You try singing ‘He can walk—it’s a miracle!’ beautifully. It’s impossible,” Em wrote me. (Naturally, it was impossible for me to imagine how Em would sound if she sang at all.)

In the boys’ room, the gunman is disconcerted by the chorus of children’s voices singing the miracle song back in the classroom. He is also perturbed by the toilet stall with the locked door. From a circumspect distance, he has peered under the stall door, but there’s nothing to see—no crutch tips, no small feet in sneakers. The gunman steps up to the closed door, giving it a hard slap. “I know you’re in there, crip—time’s up,” the gunman says. He tucks his gun under his belt and the waistband of his trousers.

As a writer, I’m distracted by what Henrietta would say about my language. The first time I saw The Kindergarten Man, it occurred to me that Paul Goode (as a writer) thinks the woman with the gun is right about Henrietta—there’s always a goody-goody giving you shit about the language that you use. Every writer knows this is true.

In the boys’ room, with its kindergartner-size urinals, the gunman looks huge; he also appears to be very fit. When he hooks his fingers over the top of the toilet-stall door, he does an effortless pull-up. This is such a snap for him, he looks like he could do twenty more. One quick pull-up and his head is above the stall door, where he gawks down. The kindergarten man has an easy shot, from point-blank range. The silencer does its job. There is an audible pop, but it doesn’t sound like a gunshot—more like a disappointing champagne cork, muffled in a towel. The gunman falls faceup on the floor. His dead, unseeing eyes are bigger than the bullet hole between them. The bullet hole has only begun to bleed when the kindergarten man comes out of the toilet stall, being careful not to step in the spreading pool of blood from the back of the dead gunman’s skull. “Time’s up,” Paul Goode tells him, quietly.